The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview.

The radio interview is here. Moore also confirms that they bused workers to the rally, and that the mine was shut down for the day (probably because so many workers would be at this "mandatory" rally). So even if workers wanted to, you know, work, they'd be forced to take a day off without pay anyway.

The powder blue Cadillac backed slowly into the group of parents and children buying snacks from a sidewalk vendor, and the crowd banged on his windows and screamed for him to stop, but not before some of the children were trapped under the car, witnesses said.

Yeh, I live in Munich, was entertaining. The fun part was that the pub they are tearing down that they found the bomb under is one of my old youth haunts. Years of drunken revelry on a bomb...

Of course the even more amusing one was the bomb they found under the pitch of the 1860 football team stadium. 60 years of football matches on a bomb... I think from now on, all footy matches should involve bombs buried under the pitch.

@ Slick: A friend of mine suffers regular, really bad outbreaks of rosacea, including in her eyes, but I'm a tad reluctant to show her this article. She still has nightmares about an ear infection she had a couple of years ago which turned out to be the result of a spider which had crawled in there and died. So discovering the bane of her skin is caused by one of its relatives squatsploding in her pores... Well, I don't think it'd be long before she was bathing in boiling bleach and scrubbing with wire wool.

Squatting in a residential building in England and Wales becomes a criminal offence on Saturday, meaning squatters would face jail or a fine.Ministers said it would offer better protection for homeowners and "slam shut the door on squatters once and for all".The maximum penalty will be six months in jail, a £5,000 fine, or both.But campaigners warned the new law could criminalise vulnerable people and lead to an increase in rough sleeping.